This afternoon, 8/13 Professor Judy Mitrani-Reiser will speak about critical care facilities in Nepal and how the earthquake on April 25th affected them.

The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), and Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association reconnaissance briefing will be streamed live from the University of California, Berkeley from 2:45PM – 4:45PM EDT. Watch it live here.

The rise of mega-disasters this century prompted development of engineering solutions for community and infrastructure resilience. ASCE 7-16 will include a new Chapter 6 Tsunami Loads and Effects, drawn from context of the 2011 Japan Tohoku Tsunami and resulting Fukushima Plant disaster. Chapter 6 is a bottom up state of the art design methodology focused on loss drivers, contrasting with other hazard provisions revised ad-hoc over several decades. The tsunami hazards awakening from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, claiming nearly 300,000 fatalities, brought attention to need for broad disaster preparedness of vulnerable populations. In the Post 9-11 Security environment, it pushed efforts to develop methods for all-hazards community and infrastructure resilience using multi-faceted research, performance based engineering and improved standards and building codes. Tsunami and other understudied hazards are advancing now with relatively low cost digitized maps, lidar and geospatial tools used for rapid exposure screening, loss modeling and engagement by the insurance and business supply chain industry. The experience from tsunami, and its seismic and flood components is a useful context for understanding disaster resilience using a lifeline infrastructure engineering framework, to help communities identify and prioritize diverse needs. Recent initiatives include the UN Disaster Resilience Scorecard developed by IBM and AECOM in 2014, and the ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division launched earlier this year. Both support the 2015 UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development ratified one month ago in New York for guiding actions over the next 15 years.